Let's make more self-driving mini-vehicles

I think there should be not only self-driving cars, but also self-driving segways, unicycles, bicycles, and more, to solve the last-mile problem.

The last-mile problem is this: when people take public transport, they can't get to exactly where they want to go, and must walk the last mile. This sometimes deters people from using public transport. There has been many solutions:

• Just walk.
• Ride-sharing bicycle/scooter/unicycles.
• Carry the bicycle along on the public transport.
• Give up and drive a car.

Why?

The main problem with ride-sharing are two:

1. Once they go out, it's hard to get them back to their stations. People like to just toss them anywhere.
2. Even if people park them nicely, it's still hard to maintain a balance of vehicles at the stations. Some stations lose bikes on average, while others gain.

The first problem is essentially the last-half-mile problem, and can be solved by adding many small stations, but that exacerbates the second problem, since each station has so few vehicles that a small fluctuation in supply and demand would completely fill or drain a station.

Let's Read: Mind Children (1988) by Hans Moravec

This book is half outdated and half amazing. The outdated parts are where he talked about the "latest" advances in AI and robotics, such as the amazing robots that could move across a cluttered room in just 5 hours! (and fails 1/4 of the times). This is why I skipped most of the first 3 chapters.

One great thing I found in the book is a very poetic description of a "Bush Robot" which can be best explained by ponies:

Bush Robot Scootaloo

Let's watch: ColdFusion videos

Today we'll just watch a bunch of videos.

The Strange Story of the Mp3 Player (begins at 1:50)
Portable music players were invented in 1979 by Kane Kramer and the way it distributes music without the internet was basically transmitting over the telephone-net at terminal vending machines in bars and music stores and such. It went bankrupt though.
Saehan made MPMan in 1998. RIAA sued Diamond Multimedia in 1998 over its MP3 player but lost, and this very publicized case made MP3 players popular. iPod, 2001, made it super popular.
Kramer got acknowledged as original inventor of iPod by Apple for some legal reasons.

Let's read: Norvig's AI, chap 24, 25, 26, 27

Continuing from last post.

Chapter 24: Perception

This chapter is about feelings, or how to sense the world through sensors. It's too engineering for me so I skipped it.

Chapter 25: Robotics

This chapter is about robotics, actuators, or how to actually move around in the world. This is about the most traditional and engineering part of the textbook, and quite out of my part, so I'll skim it as much as I skimmed technical stuff in mechanical engineering during my study of Newtonian physics.

My favorite part from the chapter is a game:

Exercise 25.11: pretend to be a robot! A game for people from kindergarten to PhD! 

I can think of a few variations on this game: First, to make communication strictly minimal, players should only communicate through text messages and webcams. Second, instead of one person playing the brain, why not use two? One for each hemisphere! The left brain can only see the right eye and control the right hand, and vice versa. Then there will be six players. 

And we can even imagine a game of epiphenomenon.

Wait a minute, this sounds just like specialization...